Homegrown Democrat

by Garrison Keillor

  6. Democrats are union guys. The spiritual base of the party is the union, that grand Victorian institution that proposes that employees have a say in the workplace and bargain as a group and not be beaten down one by one. The holy martyrs who opened the way to labor unions were those Jewish immigrant women, some of them teenagers, locked by their bosses into the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911, who, when the fire broke out in the scrap bins, had no escape and leaped to their deaths, 146 of them. Now Wal-Mart is locking its employees into the warehouses at night to discourage pilfering, so not much has changed. At United Parcel Service, the starting wage for drivers is $8.70 an hour, about what it was thirty years ago, believe it or not. Unions are a good idea unless you are planning to win the lottery. They fight for the skilled jobs that pay $25 an hour or more, enough to enable you to buy a house and have children.

  In my line of work, I encounter the American Federation of Musicians, which, among many other things, enforces a few basic work rules so that management (me) can’t work musicians overtime without paying overtime. At least, that’s the idea. In fact, musicians are as scared as UPS drivers of getting sacked, scared to speak up, to be troublemakers. Classical musicians are in oversupply—three hundred violists might rush to fill one vacancy—and orchestra strikes are rare. These are the people, beautifully trained, neurotic perfectionists, who perform for the carriage trade at the opera and the ballet, who do Messiah and The Nutcracker, who transport you with the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony and break your heart with the Mahler Fourth, and in the end they are workers, who worry about pensions and health benefits. Even if you can play that gorgeous French horn solo in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you still need to pay your kids’ dentist.

  I met my hero S. J. Perelman once at a dinner and sat across the table from him, stunned with admiration, trying to frame a compliment that would be substantial but not grandiose, and then he leaned over and groused about The New Yorker and its miserly treatment of writers, asked me how much they were paying me, shook his head when I told him, said I was worth more than that, said it was a battle he’d been fighting all his life, this assumption on the part of management that we were all goddamned Du Ponts, and this brotherly conversation, like a couple of metalworkers grousing over lunch, endeared him to me forever. To be regarded as a fellow worker by S. J. Perelman meant more to me than just about any prize.

  Unions are a little fence against sadism. You can’t, even if you’re a genius with wild hair and a long baton, keep the orchestra rehearsing through their scheduled break. Even if you’re tuned to the universal harmony of the spheres, people still have the right to pee. Even if you come to the end of rehearsal and only need five more minutes, you can’t have them without paying for fifteen or thirty, whatever the contract says. So geniuses learn to watch the clock and plan their time. The union is a conservative force, resists change, is wary of innovation, and that can be maddening (though the same can be said of the National Association of Broadcasters, or the American Medical Association, both of them on the trailing edge of progress), but the union seeks to protect the dignity of its people, and that is its nobility. Without the union, they’d be treated like Holsteins; with it, they can moo at you and if you want to fire them, you have to follow procedure. You can’t just shoot them in the knees.

  7. A Democrat begins with sympathy for the helpless, especially children and the elderly. Sympathy is the barometer of our humanity; to the extent that we share each other’s griefs and joys, we are fully alive. A person so trapped in his own head and obsessed with his own minutiae that news of earthquakes, hurricanes, drought, genocide, terror, ships sinking, trains derailing has little meaning to him, is cut off, a man without a species. He reads the story about the family who burned up in their shack, from the explosion of a kerosene stove, but it happened three miles away, no concern of his. He hears a child shriek outside but he has no children so he doesn’t go to the window. From here, it is not far to the villagers going about their business downwind from the ovens of Auschwitz. We Democrats are not nannies and our interest in, say, putting helmets on bikers or making people use inclusive pronouns is vastly less than in saving innocent children from lead poisoning, the half-million toddlers in poor neighborhoods who ingest paint chips and dust and suffer brain damage, thanks to the carelessness of adults. You see welfare parents with their children and sometimes you want to grab the parents and shake them, they are so clueless and foul-mouthed and cruel, but you can’t, so you hope that the social workers in Child Protection have enough funding to keep up with their caseload.

  Sympathy is a basic creaturely trait, the vibration of one’s being at the cry of another human—the old lady with swollen feet who clambers aboard the jam-packed bus, the woman struggling toward the gate at the airport holding one infant and pushing another in a stroller and hauling two carry-on bags, the old man climbing over the icy snow bank on the corner, the abused child, the wounded hero languishing in red tape, the old doo-wop singer cheated by the big recording label, the man on death row unfairly accused and railroaded through—your heart goes twang, and you offer a hand. If you don’t, then I will; if neither of us does, then someone will. This is the measure of a decent community, we refuse to watch suffering and turn away.

  I grew up reading Black Beauty and Heidi and Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates and other books about abused underdogs redeemed in the end, which excited my pity, a strong emotion in a child. When the good horse was mercilessly beaten, I wept and could hardly read more. Now, if I sit passively and let the old lady stand clinging to a strap and don’t offer my seat as the bus pulls away, I am deeply ashamed. The damage done to children in East Harlem is a shame to the patrons of the opera and the ladies and gentlemen dining at La Grenouille and so we embrace the idea of the safety net that catches the fallen, for which the wealthy pay a heavier share, because most Americans aren’t willing to see shantytowns spring up outside town or have crowds of hollow-eyed children trailing us in the streets, keening and begging. Most Americans are not willing to let people die in a ditch or go hungry. Democrats aren’t, that’s for sure.

  People are responsible for the dumb things they do, yes indeed. There is a Moment of Reckoning that comes occasionally to each one of us and we’re entitled to it. The truth dawns. If you leave your bike outside it will rust. If you build on a flood plain, eventually you will get flooded out and your sofa be waterlogged and your linoleum come loose. If you’re worried about drinking, stop. If you smoke cigarettes, you may wind up with lung cancer or emphysema. If you gamble, you may lose your shirt.

  There are, however, broken people in this world and it does not help matters to order them to shape up and then walk away. You wouldn’t do that with anyone you knew personally. Other people count, even broken ones. You cannot gallop through the streets like a Cossack and not notice who you are tromping into the dirt, who curses you as you go jangling past. You cannot do this in life, in business, or in politics, wielding power in behalf of your cronies in the American Petroleum Party—you really cannot—there will come a day of reckoning. You learn this when you’re two years old and other little kids climb into the sandbox with you: the sand must be shared. Jesus said, “Unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

  8. Democrats are diehard teachers. Education is a heroic task and the answer to just about anything. The Peace Corps was pure Democratic idealism: send diligent young pedagogues out into the ramshackle parts of the world to teach hygiene and reading and corn planting and well digging and you will cast bread upon the waters and accomplish endless good. Offer college courses to prison inmates and you will raise morale and reduce violence in ways that lockdowns cannot. Sit the drug addicts down in a circle and get them to educate each other. Even violent young adolescent males can be rescued by the right sort of teacher. Education is an expensive proposition but there’s no choice: nobody is born smart and we need good schools. Every chi
ld needs a beloved teacher in the early grades to instill a love of school, that enchanted world of books and paper and pencils and multiplication tables and maps and pictures, a love that will see the child through stretches of tedium and moments of panic. Every child needs teachers to idolize and imitate and around the snarly age of fourteen, when our daughters look at us with pained amusement and our sons with loathing, they need teachers who can channel their anger into social criticism and turn them into crusaders and satirists, as we once were, and then they will have children of their own and become us, the tedious authoritarians, and we will become beloved and eccentric grandparents, the genial revolutionaries, working secretly with our grandchildren against our common enemy, the parents. This is how the world turns. And teachers are crucial.

  When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal. The sorehead vote is out there, the guys who have a few beers and wonder why the hell they should have to pay taxes for the schools when their kids have graduated, What’s the logic there, Joe? and you can rouse them up and elect a school board to take revenge on the teachers and you do your community no favors.

  Redneck used to refer to farmers like my uncle Jim who did indeed have a red neck and forearms and face right up to the cap line on his forehead, but he was a generous sweet-tempered Christian man who lived out his faith. Now redneck just means somebody who’d happily spend $40,000 on a new pickup for himself and rise up in rage if someone asked him to pay $200 more for his kids’ education. They’re not farmers, they’re just selfish bastards with shit for brains who only pay attention to education when they get pissed off. The school board, a dedicated bunch of hard-working underappreciated individuals, decides to change the school nickname from the Redskins to the Hornets, and the word goes out to the tavern dwellers and for the next school board meeting, the gymnasium is packed with furious large men venting their lifelong frustrations and in the fall the school board is thrown out of office and replaced by angry large people. That’s redneck politics. The new school board sets about restoring Redskins honor, and trimming the budget, cutting out French and Spanish, establishing creationism as the prevailing science, cleansing the library of impurities, teaching faith-based social studies and history. High school becomes a forced hike down a long corridor of locked doors. You earmark your children for a career as drones—no need for them to learn a second language or write poetry or study physics: in a good redneck school, they only need to learn to sit quietly and recite the official patriotic liturgy and become angry rednecks like their daddies.

  9. Democrats are realists. We care less about symbolism and enacting our own theology into law and making people listen to us intone a prayer (O Thou who didst reveal Thyself to us, grant us victory over our despicable foes, and rain destruction and despair on them and cover their bodies with boils and sores, we do earnestly seek this in Our Savior’s Name. Amen) and we care more about the ordinary essentials of life. The New Deal put real people to work. My uncle Don was 18 in Wausau, Wisconsin, a big red-haired football star with no prospects, and got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps and went off to build paths in national parks, a big experience for him. The Rural Electrification Act extended electric power to farms and villages that couldn’t afford the capital investment: good old American socialism. The Keillor farm was one. They wired the barn so Uncle Jim had steady light to milk the cows by on winter mornings and a fluorescent light in the kitchen so he could read the Bible at night. Democrats brought about the school lunch program and the Public Health Service and integrated the armed forces, which then became a model of how Americans can be not so hung up on race. Democrats produced Head Start and food stamps and funded the college buildings to house the wave of boomers in the Seventies. The goal of Democrats has been to make this a nation of the middle class—educated people who own property and have a stake in the community and aren’t easily bullied—and the most dramatic program was the GI Bill of Rights, which boosted a whole generation into the ranks of white-collar professionals.

  We are all, God bless us, uniquely ordinary and rise up in the morning and wash our faces and pull our pants on and it would be nice to eat a breakfast that isn’t full of poisons, send our children off to a good school, ride a safe bus to work at a building that complies with health laws, and use a cell phone that won’t give us brain cancer. We’d like our employer to treat us fairly according to accepted practice. We’d like the police to guard the city against predators and vandals. We’d like to imagine that city officials are visionary and honest and committed to the common good and not in the pocket of the power company. We’d like to think that people in trouble get rescued. This is the Democratic view. We prefer the secular society to one in which persons of unpopular beliefs are ostracized, and we don’t make the American flag into the Shroud of Turin, and we refuse to be cowed by our own government, and the sexual lives of our neighbors are not of profound interest. Republicans are troubled by homosexuality and can’t figure out how not to think about it. Hunger and homelessness don’t get their attention but the sight of two women kissing gets Republicans all buzzed, what a porch light does for moths. Democrats care more about health care and other staples of middle-class life. You drive out of St. Paul into the Republican suburbs and you see what the New Deal and Fair Deal and Great Society accomplished: they enabled people of modest means to get a leg up in the world and eventually become right-wing reactionaries and pretend that they sprang fully formed from their own ambitions with no help from anybody. And vote to deny to others what they themselves were freely given. Bless their hearts. But they’re not Democrats.

  10. The values of Democrats are rooted in courtesy and kindness. Everyone gets knocked around and failure is endemic and some get dealt a lousy hand and yet what gets us through the woods is the grace of God and the kindness of others, their small good deeds, unbidden, milk and honey. The American Indian didn’t see much of our kindness, nor African Americans trying to pull themselves up out of sharecropper poverty, but for all our failings, there is a powerful river of mercy and understanding running through this nation’s history and Democrats are in that stream.

  Let not the sun set upon your wrath. Be grateful for your gifts. Say good morning. Let the customer have his say. Let aggravation pass without response. Yield to the car trying to cut in front of you. Float along in your unclouded brain and enjoy the passing parade. This is an old Democrat’s advice.

  Liberalism is the politics of kindness. It is all about opening the castle and letting the air in. Joseph McCarthy and the Red hunters of the Fifties were a visceral issue for liberals. Tailgunner Joe was an out-and-out bully and drunkard and liar who operated by innuendo and natural gas, a classic Republican prosecutor-politician, and he and his cohorts came afoul of a deep-seated American aversion to seeing people hauled up before a government committee to be grilled about their beliefs. We have the same aversion to homophobes: it’s simply another form of cruelty.

  This year, for the first time since Prohibition, it is proposed to mark up the Constitution in behalf of intolerance: the Republicans’ Anti-Bruce & Larry Amendment, which everyone over the age of eleven knows will never be enacted—billions of lawyer hours would be spent trying to plumb the implications of the thing—it is only proposed because this President needs the votes of 7 or 8 million people who get the vapors if they see two men with earrings holding hands. It is purely a prize for the Christian right and the President’s declaration for it was a brief statement, no questions, he was in and out like Speedy Gonzalez, wanting to deliver the goods without alarming anybody.

  This old Democrat believes that your marriage is a matter between you and your spouse and its sanctity depends on the two of you. You can’t beat each other and you can’t cheat on each other, without the other having legal recourse, and otherwise you do not require state supervision. If the President wants to defend the sanctity of marriage, why not an
amendment banning divorce?

  Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman, or, in Utah, women. Neither this Constitution or the constutition of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce, except if the wife be found to have lost her virginity prior to marriage, in which case she shall be stoned. May not be applicable in Texas.

  Gay marriage is an arguable issue and it will be argued. Some of us don’t know what we think about it because it doesn’t seem to touch us directly. We claim the right to be undecided. When Hallmark starts making cards for gay weddings, then we’ll make up our minds.

  Congratulations as you enter

  Marriage to one of your own gender.

  May the bells ring loud and gay

  On your joyful wedding day.

  I do think that if Larry loves Bruce and they go to the Church of the Blessed Whatever and the Rev. Starflower Moonbright intones some high-flown sentences and turns around three times and clicks his red slippers and proclaims them husband and husband, then I will wish them well and bring them a stainless-steel serving tray wrapped in nice silvery paper with a bow. This is the United States of America, 2004. It isn’t Ireland, 1928. It isn’t Iran. Odd and interesting things happen here. We should know this by now.

  When I think of kindness, I think of my aunts, who looked out for neglected kids—runts and orphans and odd ducks, their specialty—and bestowed favors on them. They extended themselves to strangers. Their hearts went out to the lonely and the grieving. They did not let shyness get in the way of charity. They did not permit bullies to tromp around unimpeded; they spoke up. They abhorred cruelty. It offended them deeply. I don’t suppose they would’ve “approved” of gay marriage but what if their nephew Larry and his partner Bruce were being shunned by some in the family and hounded by others and they had been met at the end of the driveway by Uncle Rex who told them to come no farther, the family Thanksgiving dinner was not open to them? What would my aunts have done? I suspect that one or two of them would’ve broken ranks and gotten in a car and chased down the prodigals and told them to come back and have some fatted turkey. That spirit runs deep in this country, I do believe. Great empires rise and fall, the famous come and go, cities boom and then languish, but kindness is a constant presence in America.